Enough already about me this week! Sometimes I do go on.
And on!
Tell me in the Comments section, if you please - What inspires you in life?
And, if any of you are up for it, ask me a question that you're burning to ask.
I'm not easily offended, I swear.
Eight months working in a youth work charity will do that to a person.
After coming in up the stairs to the office and taking my coat off to conversations and questions about anal lube and beer goggles, I'm practically bomb-proof, je te jure!
I've been for another interview this week, mes bloggy loves...
This time it's to officiate (in a casual capacity) at secular and civil ceremonies and weddings - What divine luck and chance that would bring - I can't wait to hear about it!
As I mentioned last week, I've been inspired by finding some lovely new bloggers who have taken Vintage to their hearts, and who decorate themselves and their homes with the results...
Check out Vintage Vixen and Helga von Trollop across there in the sidebar if you wish to see, please?
My most favourite amie in Blogworld (and other worlds!) is Sara of Fab, Feisty and Fifty (she is!), and she always made me dream with her tales of searching for Vintage clothes and items, and selling them online from her Sara's Attic on Etsy. I envied her her style and taste. I still do.
And, at the same time, there is something about this day and age that we are living through. ~ When folding cash is thinning in my purse; When it seems obscene for me to covet new things for my home, when I've always been drawn to 'stuff that has lived'... I love old things.
When I was younger, I always wanted my home to be filled with half-modern, half-antique furniture. It is. I don't think it's necessarily well co-ordinated, and it is far from finished, but I do love to search Thrift, Vintage and Antique emporiums looking for bargains and loved, needful things. I just don't do it that often, and the north east is a bit short of good places to find stuff, it seems to me...
However, I think the growing numbers of lovely ladies across the world, who are making a small living, and making their homes and themselves look beautiful, quirky, fascinating, unique by drawing upon discarded fashions and once-trendy labels are little crackers one and all.
And why not?
I only wish I were thin enough to wear the fashions. A plus-size girl can still dream though...
(Postscript: Thank you to my friends who, stopping to leave a comment recently, said - Go join a patchwork class if you can't find a patchwork quilt that you love; Go find someone to teach you crochet, when you've got as far as buying wool and a hook.
Inspired by you, I've signed up for the next batch of crochet sessions at a nearby wool shop, Treacle Wool - I never knew they offered them. And I've checked out and signed up to hear about quilting classes at a more distant barn, formerly a farm, beside the sea. I'm not there yet, but I'm working towards things - And if you hadn't told me to get my act together, I would not have done it. So, to you, ta muchly!)
Sam Taylor-Wood makes photographs and films that examine, through highly charged scenarios, our shared social and psychological conditions.
Her work examines the split between being and appearance, often placing her human subjects – either singly or in groups – in situations where the line between interior and external sense of self is in conflict
In the celebrated film Still Life (2001), an impossibly beautiful bowl of fruit decays at an accelerated pace, creating a visceral momento mori.
Taylor-Wood has also explored notions of weight and gravity in elegiac, poised photographs and films such as Ascension (2003) and a series of self-portraits (Self Portrait Suspended I - VIII) that depict the artist floating in mid air without the aid of any visible support.
Sam Taylor-Wood was born in London in 1967 and has had numerous group and solo exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (1997) and The Turner Prize (1998). Solo exhibitions include Kunsthalle Zurich (1997), Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek (1997), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC (1999), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (2000), Hayward Gallery, London (2002), State Russian Museum, St Petersburg (2004), MCA, Moscow (2004), BALTIC, Gateshead (2006), MCA Sydney (2006) MoCA Cleveland (2007) and the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston (2008).
All text courtesy of White Cube...
When Sam Taylor-Wood isn't to be seen driving around with a young man half her age - and why should she not when her Gallery Owner ex- is seen on a yacht squiring Lily Allen, she's a talented and interesting British artist...
I was aware of the buzz around her work... Her film of the sleeping(?) David Beckham, capturing his beauty, and so not his budgie-startling voice, had captured the Zeitgeist... People seemed interested in seeing famous people in peculiar and unusual situations...
I recently wine-blogged, and posted two pieces in one day by accident... Those of you who caught my Big Boys Don't Cry posting, showing famous men, actors, in truthfully depicted sorrow, before I deleted it in error, are lucky...
Some of Sam's images for me hark back to mediaeval portraits and still-lifes... And when I visited the Baltic art gallery in Gateshead a few years ago, and saw her pictures of these fabulous and famous men crying their hearts out, it entranced me thoroughly...
I hope you might find something in Sam's art to love too, mes bloggy Surrealistes, something that whispers softly to your gentle souls...
